Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [252]
That many Mohmands sympathize with the Taleban would, once again, not have come as a surprise to those British officials who were once responsible for keeping them in hand. The Durand Line cut the tribe in half, but failed as elsewhere to cut tribal ties of sympathy with the Mohmands of Afghanistan. Nor, as elsewhere, did it create anything like a regular international frontier. Throughout the years following 2001, the mountainous parts of the Mohmand Agency have been an important route for Taleban infiltration into north-eastern Afghanistan.
The great tribal rising of 1897 was led in these parts by the Mullah of Hada, whose religious authority extended to both sides of the line, and who was imprisoned by the Amir of Afghanistan just as he was pursued by the British. For a long time, trade on the roads was taxed not by the two states but by the clans themselves – just as, today, it is taxed by the local militias making up the Pakistani Taleban, and the occasional independent warlord like Mangal Bagh Afridi (who, however, also acts in the name of Islam).
Between the British arrival in the region in the 1840s and the creation of the Durand Line, in the words of the British official W. R. H. Merk, ‘by the tacit consent of the governments concerned, those of [British] India and of Kabul, a modus vivendi was established by which either government dealt with the clans as if the other [government] did not exist.’24 A quaint formulation but, to judge by the experience of recent years, perhaps the only way the Afghan and Pakistani states of today will ever find to co-exist in this region.
I went to the Mohmand Agency to visit a local malik family of my acquaintance, whose father is a senior official in Islamabad but who maintain a house in their ancestral village near the town of Shapqadar. This town itself is a monument to the British Raj, having grown up around the fort which the British built to bar the entrance from the Mohmand territories into the Peshawar valley.
The villages around Shapqadar were founded by rebellious Mohmands from the hills, resettled by the British under the guns of the fort, and placed under the regular British Indian legal code, not the Frontier Crimes Regulations. So the area is one of the numerous anomalies of the Frontier – a ‘settled’ part of a tribal agency, but one whose inhabitants retain the legends of their old unsettled past. In 1897 the fort was attacked by the followers of the Mullah of Hada, who left 300 of their number dead before its walls – part of the campaign described by Winston Churchill in ‘The Malakand Field Force’, which he accompanied as an officer-cum-war correspondent.25
The prestige and wealth of the ‘Akhundzada’ family whom I visited near Shapqadar came originally from their descent from another local ‘Sufi’ religious figure, Akhund Zafar, who led yet another revolt under the banner of jihad against the infidel. ‘His shrine is only thirty minutes’ drive from here, but now it is Taleban territory and too dangerous for us to visit,’ I was told. Like many saints, he is also famous for having cast out demons, and people with psychologically disturbed relatives will take them to his shrine to be exorcised, a fact mentioned deprecatingly by the family.
As with the Gailanis of Afghanistan, there is an old and familiar irony here: the semi-Westernized noble family whose local influence originally came from an anti-Western struggle, a new version of which is aimed at them and their class, and from ‘superstitious’ beliefs which they now disown, trying to maintain their power in the face of a new wave of ‘fanaticism’, with which their ancestor would probably have been wholly in sympathy.
Shapqadar is still a barrier to getting out of